Starting last week, following a strong showing at the Mobile World Congress, MediaTek has a new brand name for its premium phone SoCs that is easier to remember than MT, followed by four digits.

MediaTek's current flagship SoC is branded MT6795, where MT stands for - you'll never guess - MediaTek. The competition is using similar number schemes, but also simpler brands like Snapdragon, which is easier to understand and remember. For example, the Snapdragon 810 is also known as MSM8994 and MSM according to Qualcomm´s Wikipedia webpage means Mobile Station Modem (MSM).

MediaTek is going to use Helio X branding for its high-end SoCs such as MT6795. This SoC will be known as Helio X10. The X comes from Extreme performance, something that we saw in the chip industry before. This is MediaTek's brand for the state of the art mobile computing technology and uncompromising performance and multimedia peformance, the company's top of the hill products. Helio comes from the ancient Greek Sun god Helios.

The runner up parts will be branded as Helio P series, where you can expect Premium performance optimised for battery life, PCB footprint and the form factor. This product like should enable high-end features in super slim designs aimed at the mainstream/performance market segment.

We got our first in-depth branding details from MediaTek's Vice President, Worldwide Public and Analyst Relations, Kristin Taylor, as well as some insights from Mohit Bhushan VP & GM, MediaTek Head of US Business Development. We had a chance to talk to Taylor and Bhushan last week at the Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona.

The Xelio X10 is an 64-bit LTE octa-core 2.2GHz design, with eight A53 cores emploring patented CorePilot technology. The chip also includes some cool and differentiated multimedia features. We have been talking about the 120Hz display support that is a great feature when you see it live. This is the world's first chipset provider to endorse 120Hz technology into mobile. The chip supports MediaTek's MiraVision display picture quality technology, as well as the SmartScreen algorithms that you can check in the video below, explained by Russ Mestechkin, Director of corporate sales in Latin America. SmartScreen is an image enhancement technology that help render images better, using a custom pixel-per-pixel algorithm. The goal is to make phones with SmartScreen appear brighter under direct sunlight than the competition.

We can also remind you that Xelio X10, previously known as MT6795, has support for H.265 encode up to 4K2K 30fps, as well as Instant focus and Super Slow Motion technology. We hope to see Helio X10 in some important design wins such as the HTC One E9 codenamed A55 that we mentioned the other day, as well as the Meizu MX5, and hopefully some other flagship phones as well.

The company representative also added that MediaTek is making aggressive strides into North America and Europe as well as driving significant sales in India, South America and Russia, these are the companies key markets, well including whole Asia of course.

MediaTek is definitely shaping up to become a serious competitor in the smartphone SoC market. The company started the octa-core thing last year, with a frugal Cortex-A7 chip and in 2015 most players are following with big.LITTLE chips.

In desktops and notebooks it is hard to find an eight core, but apparently even your mainstream mobile phone will end up with eight small ARM cores.

MediaTek's new MT6753 features eight Cortex-A53 clocked between 1.3GHz and 1.5GHz and the SoC is powered by Mali-T720 graphics. The chip supports 1080p display, cameras up to 16 megapixels, dual-band WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0 as well as LTE, FDD-LTE, WCDMA, T-SCDMA, GSM, CDMA1x, EVDO or CDMA. It is ready for almost any network.

Since the chip is based on the new A53 core, it means that it is a 64-bit part and will fight competitors such as Qualcomm in the mainstream market. Bear in mind that even mainstream mobile SoCs tend to offer decent performance nowadays, in relatively affordable phones. The chip is still 28nm, as using the 20nm node would probably be too expensive for a mainstream chip at this time.

Back in 2013 we examined the idea of using eight frugal ARM cores instead of four big ones or a big.LITTLE configuration. MediaTek was the first company to launch such parts and the seemingly strange design decision made a lot of sense.

MediaTek also has two quad-cores for entry 4G phones that should launch shortly - both are based on the A53 core. The faster one is the MT6735, with LTE and CDMA. It works at 1.5GHz and supports cameras up to 13 megapixels. The runner up clocks in at 1GHz and has LTE, 8-megapixel camera support and CDMA support.

It looks like Snapdragon 615 has support for larger display resolutions including WQXGA 2560x1600, but we don’t think that there will be a mainstream phone with such a resolution anytime soon. The GPU of choice is the Adreno 405.

In the end, the MediaTek MT6753 will be a slower version of the already available MediaTek MT6752 SoC that runs at 1.7GHz, versus 1.5 GHz with MT6753. One noticeable difference is that the new MT6753 supports CDMA, something that you will need for China Unicom and its 295 million subscribers, 141 million who are on the faster 3G and 4G networks.

Earlier this year Samsung launched the first commercially available big.LITTLE ARM SoC and unleashed its marketing machine, hyping the benefits of ARM’s big.LITTLE configuration and octa-cores in general. Qualcomm wouldn’t stand for it. Qualcomm’s outspoken CMO Anand Chandrasekher took a few less than diplomatic jabs at Samsung, saying octa-cores are “dumb” and that Qualcomm has no intention of building them, since its engineers “don’t do dumb things”.

From a purely technical perspective Chandrasekher was right and most technologists agreed with him. Qualcomm and Apple have made it abundantly clear that optimized custom cores can easily beat the brute force approach of smaller chip designers who use off-the-shelf ARM tech. However, there is a very good reason some companies are still betting on the “more is better” approach and it all comes down to money rather than silicon.

Designing custom cores is simply not an option for smaller outfits. They lack the resources and know-how to pull it off, so custom cores are reserved for big players, at the top of ARM’s licensing pyramid. On the face of it, this doesn’t leave smaller chipmakers that many options – they have to use what they’ve got, and they’ve got IP for reference ARM cores which they can’t play around with. However, operating under such constraints is forcing them to look for alternative ways of coming up with competitive designs.

One of the ways of getting around these limitations was demonstrated by MediaTek, in the form of their new Cortex A7-based octa-core, the MT6592. Although it’s an octa-core, it is practically a mid range chip, but in some benchmarks like Antutu it comes close to Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 600, but MediaTek’s chip has a much less potent GPU and since it’s an octa-core its real world performance won’t be as good as the benchmarks would have us believe, as most apps can’t put the additional cores to good use.

So why does it make perfect sense then? Well, ARM has a peculiar and complicated IP licensing model. In case you’re interested in the finer points of ARM’s business model and how it could apply to cheap octa-cores, you can check out this extensive report on Anandtech.

Since the big players can buy architecture licenses and play around with custom chips, they don’t necessarily have to add more cores to boost performance. This is Apple’s and Qualcomm’s turf, Samsung is also expected to roll out custom chips next year, although this is still not official. Smaller players aren’t in the architecture game, but they can still compete by building competitive mid-range parts. Since they can’t differentiate their products with fancy custom cores and GPUs, they can do what MediaTek is doing – stick plenty of cheap cores onto a single die and pray that the market will like the idea. Since MediaTek already has more than 20 design wins for the MT6592, it seems to be off to a good start. And here's what MediaTek claims when it comes to efficiency.

The Cortex A7 is tiny, it’s one fifth the size of an A15, which makes it an interesting choice to get more performance on a budget, on a relatively small die.

“When you consider that an A15 is five times the area and power of the A7, but only three times the throughput, it also becomes an attractive option on a die cost basis,” research firm Future Horizons told us.

What’s more, IP royalties for multiple A7 cores don’t cost nearly as much as A15s per core or per chip - there’s no need for an upfront A15 license fee, either. Using a familiar core also saves on design time.

In addition to MediaTek’s octa-core, which is the first and only A7 octa-core so far, there are a number of quad-core A7/A5 designs and most of them end up in cheap tablets and phones. They’re not nearly as powerful as a quad A9, but they are also a lot more efficient and don’t cost as much. In fact, tiny quad-core A7 SoCs are the weapon of choice for white-box tablet makers and since the market for $99 tablets is booming, this bodes well for Rockchip, Allwinner and MediaTek. For example, MediaTek is estimated to have a 50 percent market share in China and this year it should ship 200 million SoCs. Combined shipments of phones, tablets and PCs are expected to hit 2.3 billion units this year, smartphone shipments could hit the 1 billion mark soon and it’s clear that there’s a huge market for cheap mobile chips.

However, octa-core A7 chips are hardly a serious trend at this point and it’s unlikely that they will take off in all markets. The A7 simply lacks the power to be a viable long-term option, especially in demanding apps that don’t handle multicores all that well, i.e. games. To squeeze more performance out of octa-cores, developers would need to reconfigure their code to tap all the potential, but for that to happen octa-cores have to become relevant and thus justify the expense of extra coding. It’s a vicious circle and we’re not sure many developers will be willing to waste resources on such tweaks anytime soon.

This is where it gets interesting, as MediaTek and Rockchip have already teased their first A12 quads. They should ship in early 2014. The A12 is about 40 percent faster than the venerable A9 it was designed to replace. In terms of performance, it’s close to Qualcomm’s first-gen Krait, yet it has a few interesting features, such as big.LITTLE support. On paper, it looks like a good choice for an octa-core, since it won’t be hampered by lacklustre single thread performance. Analysts agree that an octa-core A12 is one of the better choices in architecting such SoCs and if companies start announcing them, developers may have to start thinking about tweaking code for octa-cores, especially in Asian markets.

Then there’s also the possibility of using A12 cores alongside A7 or A15 cores in a big.LITTLE implementation, but although it’s technically possible such a configuration wouldn’t make as much sense as an A7/A15 combo.

We didn’t forget about 64-bit ARMv8 cores, either. However, the A53 is a small core and in terms of performance it should end up well behind the A12. The A57 could be great for server parts, but it doesn’t make too much sense for consumer devices, as it won’t end up much faster than the A15 and 64-bit support is still not very relevant in the consumer space. Add to that the higher licensing fees for A50-series products and ARMv8, along with more R&D and 64-bit overhead, the need to use costlier nodes and the new 64-bit parts start to lose their appeal, fast.

This means A7, A12 and A15 products will end up with a much longer shelf life than many people expect. It could also pave the way to more strange designs like MediaTek’s octa-core, or affordable, LTE-enabled big.LITTLE chips designed specifically for mid-range devices, a far cry from Samsung’s big ~$28 Exynos 5 Octa.

MediaTek raised quite a few eyebrows earlier this year when it announced it would build the world’s first proper ARM octa-core, not a big.LITTLE design. The MT6592 has now popped up on a Chinese site, with the first Antutu results.

It scored 25,496, which places it behind the 1.7GHz Snapdragon in the HTC One, but it’s still a lot faster than the Nexus 4’s Qualcomm APQ8064, although throttling may have something to do with that. The score seems too high, but not long after the results emerged, a number of mobile sites started talking about disappointing results, claiming that MediaTek’s octa-core was somehow supposed to end up on a par with Samsung’s latest Exynos 5 big.LITTLE chip and the Qualcomm 800.

This of course is utter rubbish and FUD of the highest order.

The 28nm MT6592 is indeed an octa-core, but it has eight A7 cores, not a combo of A15 and A7 cores. The A7 is about one fifth of the die area of an A15 and according to ARM it consumes one quarter to one fifth of the power, making such comparisons asinine. In other words, MediaTek’s octa-core should end up a lot smaller and cheaper than a quad A15, maybe even a quad A12. That is why we find the 25,496 result hard to believe - it should be less, not more. For example, the Tegra 4 on Shield hits about 36,000, yet it's a much bigger chip, on a device with more RAM.

The benchmarked chip ran at 1.7GHz, but MediaTek said the MT6592 should have no trouble hitting 2GHz, which could make it faster than a Snapdragon 600. What’s more, the tested device featured 1GB of RAM, 720p display and a Mali-450 GPU, so it is clearly not high-end.

However, the big problem for MediaTek’s curious new SoC is the sheer number of cores. Most apps simply can’t put them to good use and unless MediaTek has a clever trick up its sleeve, the chip might not be nearly as fast in real world applications. It does look promising in benchmarks, though.

Although we are still far away from the launch of the Optimus G II rumored for next fall, Korea Times reports that LG is already working on an octa-core chipset called Odin that should be a main part of the next-gen Optimus G.

It is, of course, a logical move and LG will probably follow the footsteps of Samsung and Huawei by making its own in-house chipset. LG apparently already plans to outsource the manufacturing to TSMC and might end up to be quite similar to Samsung's big.LITTLE architecture by combining four low-power Cortex-A7 cores with four Cortex-A15 cores.

The Odin is apparently heading for smartphones but might be easily used for future tablets as well, a part of the market that LG has not been focusing on.

AMD has dared to show a picture of Orochi, an eight-core 32nm Bulldozer-based server CPU. This will be the first Bulldozer to come and we expect to see it in 2011.

This is also the future high-end chip for AMD even though we are not sure why consumers would want to have eight cores on their desktops, but we do know that it will happen whether or not we want it or not.

Together with Llano, Orochi will be AMD’s first high-K metal gate 32nm chip and they are both expected in 2011. We believe that Bulldozer has already been taped out as in the CPU work it takes roughly a year from the first tape out to final product.

Since we expect Bulldozer Orochi to ship in the second half of 2011, the samples should be ready as we speak. At least it was mentioned today at the Global Technology conference here in Santa Clara, California, ironically just a mile away from Nvidia and Intel headquarters.